It's a tale of the two World Cups - one on a field and one playing out on this country's streets.

As Brazilians raise the curtain this week on what is arguably the world's most popular sporting event, the country's fervent love of soccer is butting up against public anger over charges of wasteful spending, corruption, traffic jams, strikes and a litany of other complaints.

After enduring a year of anti-government protests that tied up roads and strikes that paralyzed public transport, schools and other services, many exhausted Brazilians finally are preparing to cheer on their beloved team, though in what may be the flattest pre-Cup climate they have yet seen.

On a dark, rain-soaked street in Rio's Copacabana neighborhood, Francisco Nascimento climbed a rickety wooden ladder to hang plastic streamers in the colors of Brazil's national flag. With only a few days to go before the Cup's opening match, Nascimento was running out of time to repeat the ritual he has completed for every World Cup since 1982.

"I started putting the decorations up really late this year, I can't say why. Normally I would have done this a month earlier," Nascimento said. "Still, I feel a responsibility to show the world our pride, even if it's just these little streamers.

"Brazil's struggles, our frustration with politicians, have dampened excitement, and that anger won't go away. But I don't know anybody who isn't praying for our team to show its grit, to show our swagger, and win this Cup."

Anticipation is building over the tournament's expected drama: Will boy wonder Neymar help Brazil avenge its haunting 1950 Cup loss in Maracana? Will Lionel Messi finally lead Argentina to glory on its archrival's home turf? Or will an underdog team emerge to captivate the world's imagination?

But on the Cup's eve and with great hopes that Brazil's team will win its sixth world title, surely attention will focus on the soccer and not on the street?

"There is certainly a mood of 'we've already paid for the party so we might as well enjoy it'," said Juca Kfouri, one of Brazil's best-known sports commentators. "But there is also the feeling that a lot of people are ashamed. They're ashamed to wear the Brazil jersey or put a Brazilian flag in their window because of the protests, because they don't want to be associated with the exorbitant spending on the Cup."

Brazilians question whether the expense of hosting the Cup will prove to have been worth it, considering their constant pain of having one of the world's heaviest tax burdens yet still enduring dilapidated hospitals, roads, security and other poor public services. Many demand Brazil build schools as spectacular as the new stadiums.

Recent polls show half the population disapproves of Brazil hosting the event; a position once unthinkable for the nation that embodies soccer like no other. Three-fourths polled are convinced corruption has tinged World Cup works which have cost the country $11.5 billion.

The struggles with the Cup have become emblematic of Brazil's larger ills, of citizens' feelings that they are forever hamstrung by politicians on the take and their anger at dealing daily with a broken, frustrating system.

Brazilians are split on whether their country's international reputation will be helped or hindered by the event, according to a recent Pew Research Center report, despite leaders' grand hopes that the event would unveil a newly-powerful Brazil on the global stage.

Even a popular poll giving the "temperature reading" of how Brazilians feel about the Cup indicates mixed sentiments, with about 40 percent telling the Ibope polling group they were on the cold-to-frozen end of the spectrum, 30 percent on the warm-to-boiling side, and the rest in the lukewarm middle.

President Dilma Rousseff, whose popularity in polls continues to slip ahead of an October presidential election, has repeatedly invoked the warm nature of the Brazilian people as being the country's saving grace.

Kindness and smiles will make up for incomplete airport renovations, public transportation works that never got off the ground and worries of logistical struggles for the hundreds of thousands of fans as they move around a continent-sized nation with already seriously strained infrastructure, Rousseff hopes.

(China Daily 06/11/2014 page24)